Understanding Indonesian values: a preliminary research to identify Indonesian culture
Daftar Isi:
- Culture is one topic that attracts researchers from many major disciplines such as psychology, marketing, consumer behavior, and other disciplines. This is because culture affects people to behave. Furthermore, culture is the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behavior. Many research use of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to measure culture. The dimensions identified by Hofstede (1980) are regarded as the most widely used and accepted for understanding culture in many social phenomena. On the other hand, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions have been criticized by many scholars. For instance, Hofstede’s work is claimed as out-of-date because the empirical work took place in 1967-1973. Hofstede’s work has also been criticized for reducing culture to four or five dimensions. On the other hand, identifying reliable cultural dimensions for each nation would give major contribution to cross-cultural research. Therefore, although cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede gives contributions to understand and measure culture, but there is a need to develop and identify Indonesian culture. This is because there is limited research in identifying Indonesian culture. Therefore, this study aims to identify Indonesian culture by identifying Indonesian values as an initial stage in scale development. More than 2,000 open-ended questionnaires were distributed to respondents in Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, and Surabaya. All respondents were chosen with two main criteria: (1) that respondent live in one of four research areas (Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, or Surabaya), and (2) that respondents should work in the area that they live. A total of 1455 usable questionnaires were used to identify Indonesian values. The result shows that gotong royong (mutual aid), demokrasi (democracy), agama (religion), Pancasila, budaya (culture), and kekeluargaan (family) are examples of Indonesian values. However, the results also shows that respondents state that korupsi (corruption), individualisme (individualism), KKN (Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme: corruption, collution, nepotism), and egois (ego) are also examples of Indonesian values. Those values that have been pointed by respondents then were proceeded to develop indicators. This research provides those indicators. Those indicators then will be used to identify Indonesian culture dimensions.